How Committed Parents Steer a Brooklyn School’s Hopeful Course
Clara Hemphill's forthcoming book tells the story of Bedford-Stuyvesant's Brighter Choice Community School as it faced changing neighborhood demographics, was tested by Covid-19, and more.
Brighter Choice may be a tiny school in the gigantic New York City school system. But the lessons it has to teach reverberate beyond its walls.
Key to Brighter Choice’s success are the Black parents who form the core of the PTA. Some attended private schools or mostly White public schools themselves and wanted something different for their own children: a school, in their own neighborhood, where Black and Brown children did not feel isolated, where all children learned tolerance and mutual understanding. Few of these parents had racial integration as a goal – they simply wanted a school that would nurture their children. But the school became more racially integrated as Latino, White, Asian, and multiracial families, attracted by the school’s warm sense of community and its commitment to social justice, began to enroll their children.
White parents and children are learning what it means to be in the minority; Black parents are learning to lead multiracial coalitions; and people from all groups are learning to accommodate one another.
Brighter Choice is a work in progress. Chronic absenteeism is still high; academic achievement, as measured by test scores, is uneven. Nonetheless, the school is moving in the right direction. The extraordinary dedication of the principal and staff – who frequently work on Saturdays and are always accessible to parents – coupled with parents’ eagerness to be involved has produced an atmosphere of mutual trust. Most of all, parents are willing to work for common good, not just for their own children.
The changing demographics of Bedford-Stuyvesant make it possible to mix children of different races and family incomes without sending children long distances to school. That’s not always possible to do. As income inequality has grown, rich people increasingly live in neighborhoods with other rich people, poor people in neighborhoods with other poor people. But the city is changing, and, particularly at the elementary school level, a growing number of formerly high-poverty schools, like Brighter Choice, now serve a mix of children of different family incomes as well as different races and ethnicities.
Decades of research have demonstrated that socioeconomic integration – that is, mixing children of different family incomes, as Brighter Choice has done – offers one of the best hopes for improving school achievement for children from low-income families. Indeed, students from low-income families in economically diverse schools are as much as two years ahead of students from low-income families in high-poverty schools.
The best way to reduce high concentrations of poverty, of course, would be to reduce poverty overall. Parents with higher incomes have less stress, more time to spend with their children, and more money for books and school supplies. It’s not surprising that children do better in school when their families have more money.
Sadly, our country seems to be resigned to both high levels of child poverty and the highest income inequality in the industrial world. In the absence of political will to deal with inequality or child poverty overall, socioeconomic integration of schools can at least begin to help boost low-income Black and Latino children’s chances of academic success.
Socioeconomic integration – and the racial integration that often goes along with it – can benefit middle-class and professional White and Asian families as well. These families often stretch their budgets to buy overpriced housing in “good” – that is, very expensive – school districts with high local taxes (and overwhelmingly White and Asian enrollments). By sending their children to a school like Brighter Choice – and investing their time and energy to make it strong – parents can take advantage of housing costs that, while increasing, are still lower than the most expensive suburbs.
Brighter Choice has reconciled two strains of thought within the African American community: on the one hand, the belief that all-Black schools with Black teachers offer a much-needed refuge from racism and, on the other hand, the belief that integrated schools provide equity and prepare children for life in a multiracial democracy. Brighter Choice manages to accomplish the goals of both advocates of Black self-determination and integrationists. Founded as an Afrocentric school, Brighter Choice has managed to foster a sense of trust at a time of dramatic change, conflict, and tension in the school and in the city.
School choice in New York City has long pitted families of different races and income levels against one another as parents scramble to enroll their children in “good” schools – usually defined as schools with high test scores. Brighter Choice has changed the definition of a “good” school and, in doing so, has allowed parents of different races and income levels to see they have a shared interest in building an effective school. Brighter Choice, while facing many challenges, holds the promise of teaching the tolerance and respect we need to bring together our fractious, multiethnic society.
Brighter Choice is well on its way to building a just school in an unequal city.
Clara Hemphill, founder of the InsideSchools project at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, has researched and written about New York City schools for more than 30 years. Excerpted from A Brighter Choice: Building a Just School in an Unequal City with the permission of the author and the publisher, Teachers College Press at Columbia University. All rights reserved.
Photo by: Clara Hemphill